New York City came up to me in the bar and asked if it could buy me a drink and I thought, Why not? It's New York City. One drink couldn't hurt. We hit it off. New York was charming without being pushy. With just the right hint of danger. Not I'm going to wear you as a skin-suit kind of danger. More like, I know a guy who knows a guy who can have your creep exboyfriend's legs broken kind of danger.
What can I say? I liked it.
New York City came home with me that night. We made love. Okay, let's be honest. We didn't "make love." We had the kind of sloppy, three-cocktail sex where we spent half the time remembering where everything went. But it was good for what it was. New York promised to call. I said, awesome. But don't worry. Because...

When I moved here I promised myself I wouldn't become one of those girls who dates New York City. Flirt with it; take it home for the occasional drunken screw. Don't date. Never date.
Then a week later the phone rang. It was New York. Hey, so Neutral Milk Hotel is playing this gig at a loft for like thirty people. Wanna go?
And I'm like, uh yeah.
Everything was perfect. The band was perfect. The loft was perfect. The people there were the New Yorkers you read about in the Style section. The weather was...Well, what are you going to do about the weather.
We went back to my place. And this time...[insert sound that suggests the sex was better than just okay]. No joke, we broke the headboard.
After that we saw each other, two, three times a week. My friends thought I was setting myself up for a fall. Especially my friends who were born here. They love the city but they'd never, ever date it. It'd be weird. Like fingering your cousin weird. You know too much about each other. You can see through the fascade.
And I thought--Okay.
Have fun, but don't get invested. It's just a good time. That's all.
Don't give New York your heart.
You'd think that wouldn't be so hard. Because not every night is perfect. Sure, some nights, it's just the two of us walking the streets and every surface glistens. Like the City is showing off just for me.
But some nights we show up at a party and it seems like New York is paying attention to everyone except me. I get so fed up I leave alone. And I think, Never again. Then New York will show up at my door in the morning with bagels from that place in Staten Island I can never remember the name of.
It's the same with the sex. Some nights we lock ourselves in my bedroom and it's a contest to see who can make the other come more or faster or harder.
I end up on my phone looking for a take-out place that will deliver Gatorade at four in the morning.
Other times, it lasts three minutes and I spend half an hour in the bathroom trying to get come out of my hair.

But the thing is, with New York...Even when it's shitty, I kinda like it. If I didn't like things to be a little too dirty or too rough or too gross or too rushed or too fucking exhausting, I wouldn't be dating New York in the first place.

Because, yeah, it's hot summer trash smell and crushing rent and catcalls from the stoops.
But it's also dollar slice pizza on every block, warm air out of subway grates in winter, my heels scraping a secret code into the concrete.
It's the dry-bone behemoths in the Natural History Museum and the unfamiliar songs in another language that waft down out of the windows in Chinatown.
It's the way the subway rumbles beneath the Anjelika Movie Theatre and finding just the right view from Fort Tryon Park.
It's Dorothy Parker and Allen Ginsburg and Langston Hughes. It's Patti Smith and Lou Reed and my downstairs neighbor who moved into her apartment in 1943,
who fell out of the gates of a gulag right into New York City's arms,
who says she's been in love with this city all her life and she could tell you stories
and if you ask her nice she'll sing you nursery rhymes from the old country.

We're still dating.
Much to my surprise and my friends' chagrin. They say I spend more time with New York than I do with them. Maybe that's true. Maybe they're just jealous. Jealous that they aren't brave enough.
Brave enough to give the city their heart. Their soft, fragile, warm wet beating heart.
And let it do whatever it wants with it.
But I have.
Stupidly, dangerously, truly.
And I know the city will break it.
I know.
But in the meantime...my city is there for me.
And I'm there for it.